Despite being essential for apprenticeship, the stimulus to the student’s active posture (versus
the listener’s one), the respect to the individual learning pace, the formative evaluations and
the supply of systematic feedback to the student are frequently outside the classrooms in
schools and colleges. A strategy to bring such characteristics to the classrooms is through
individualized teaching. One of the individualized teaching procedures most documented and
applied is Fred S. Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction (PSI). Intensively used in the
70‟s, thousands of articles were published about PSI, giving vast empirical evidence about its
results, which, in general, is superior to other forms of teaching. In spite of that, the
application of this method began to decline in the 80‟s. Among the reasons for that, it’s
possible to highlight the amount of initial efforts that were necessary to build a course based
on the PSI, the possible resistance from teachers and educators due to the change in the
teacher’s role from knowledge transmitter to advisor and the necessary logistics to provide a
systematic feedback to students. It’s also worth to emphasize that, independently from which
factors contributed to the decline in the usage of PSI, its efficiency is unquestionable. At the
present work, an individualized teaching methodology based on the PSI was analyzed and
experimented in an introductory course of electromagnetism for Physics students at the third
college semester at the Federal University of Pará (Brazil). This methodology employed some
of the characteristics of the PSI, respecting the features of the subject like the presence of long
calculations and absence of tutors. There was evidence that, despite the introduced
modifications, the application of the methodology may bring many of the positive results
obtained with the application of the PSI.
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